Opera de Paris Garnier

The poet Pierre Perrin began thinking and writing about the possibility of French opera in 1655 more than a decade before the official founding of the Paris Opera as an institution. He believed that the prevailing opinion of the time that the French language was fundamentally unmusical was completely incorrect. Seventeenth century France offered Perrin essentially two types of organization for realizing his vision: a Royal academy or a public theater.

In 1666 he proposed to the minister Colbert that "the king decree 'the establishment of an Academy of Poetry and Music' whose goal would be to synthesize the French language and French music into an entirely new lyric form." Even though Perrin's original concept was of an academy devoted to discussions of French opera, the king's intention was in fact a unique hybrid of royal academy and public Theatre, with an emphasis on the latter as an institution for performance. On 28 June 1669 Louis XIV signed the Privil Despite this early success Cambert and two other associates did not hesitate to swindle Perrin, who was imprisoned for debt and forced to concede his privilege on 13 March 1672 to the surintendant of the king's music Jean-Baptiste Lully.